How can we believe in ‘global warming’ when the temperature records providing the ‘evidence’ for that warming cannot be trusted?

It’s a big question – and one which many people, even on the sceptical side of the argument, are reluctant to ask.

[…]

[B]efore I go into technical detail about why the temperature records are suspect, let me provide an analogy which ought to make it perfectly clear to any neutral parties reading this why the problem I’m about to describe ought not to be consigned to the realms of crackpottery.

Suppose say, that for the last 100 years my family have been maintaining a weather station at the bottom of our garden, diligently recording the temperatures day by day, and that what these records show is this: that in the 1930s it was jolly hot – even hotter than in the 1980s; that since the 1940s it has been cooling.

What conclusions would you draw from this hard evidence?

Well the obvious one, I imagine, is that the dramatic Twentieth Century warming that people like Al Gore have been banging on about is a crock. At least according to this particular weather station it is.

Now how would you feel if you went and took these temperature records along to one of the world’s leading global warming experts – say Gavin Schmidt at NASA or Phil Jones at CRU or Michael Mann at Penn State – and they studied your records for a moment and said: “This isn’t right.” What if they then crossed out all your temperature measurements, did a few calculations on the back of an envelope, and scribbled in their amendments? And you studied those adjustments and you realised, to your astonishment, that the new, pretend temperature measurements told an entirely different story from the original, real temperature measurements: that where before your records showed a cooling since the 1940s they now showed a warming trend.

When the climate scientist and geologist Bob Carter of James Cook University in Australia wrote an article in 2006 saying that there had been no global warming since 1998 according to the most widely used measure of average global air temperatures, there was an outcry. A year later, when David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London made the same point, the environmentalist and journalist Mark Lynas said in the New Statesman that Mr. Whitehouse was “wrong, completely wrong,” and was “deliberately, or otherwise, misleading the public.”

We know now that it was Mr. Lynas who was wrong. Two years before Mr. Whitehouse’s article, climate scientists were already admitting in emails among themselves that there had been no warming since the late 1990s. “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998,” wrote Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in Britain in 2005. He went on: “Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”

If the pause lasted 15 years, they conceded, then it would be so significant that it would invalidate the climate-change models upon which policy was being built. Areport from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) written in 2008 made this clear: “The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more.”

Well, the pause has now lasted for 16, 19 or 26 years—depending on whether you choose the surface temperature record or one of two satellite records of the lower atmosphere. That’s according to a new statistical calculation by Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Canada.

It has been roughly two decades since there was a trend in temperature significantly different from zero. The burst of warming that preceded the millennium lasted about 20 years and was preceded by 30 years of slight cooling after 1940.

This important dataset was left out of climate analysis because if you want the Medieval Warm Period to disappear, and you want a hockey stick at the end showing “unprcedented” warming…then you can;t possibly have data like this included.

[T]he Law Dome series was discussed by IPCC authors in the preparation of AR4. Their Southern Hemisphere graphic showed two proxies: Cook’s Tasmanian and Oroko Swamp NZ tree ring chronologies. As noted a few days ago, these two proxies are the only two proxies in the medieval portion of the Gergis et al network. So despite its claims to novelty, there is nothing new in its medieval portion.

A Climategate email shows that Phil Jones asked about the omission of the Law Dome series from the IPCC illustration in the AR4 First Draft. I asked the same question about the AR4 Second Draft. They realized that the Law Dome graphic had an elevated medieval period and thus, including it in the graphic would – to borrow a phrase from the preparation of AR3 – would “dilute the message” and perhaps provide “fodder to skeptics”. CRU’s Tim Osborn, expert in such matters, proposed that they discuss Law Dome in the running text (thus providing themselves deniability), but not illustrate Law Dome in the graphic (since a picture was worth a thousand words.) CLA Overpeck endorsed Osborn’s sly ‘solution”, sneering at the supposed lack of expertise at even raising the “ambiguity” in the first place:

Hi Tim, Ricardo and friends – your suggestion to leave the figure unchanged makes sense to me. Of course, we need to discuss the Law Dome ambiguity clearly and BRIEFLY in the text, and also in the response to “expert” review comments (sometimes, it is hard to use that term “expert”…). Ricardo, Tim and Keith – can you take care of this please. Nice resolution, thanks.

In making this proposal, Osborn observed (CG2 3092. 2006-07-18)

(2) Goosse et al. showed Deuterium excess [for Law Dome] as an indicator of Southern Ocean SST (rather than local temperature). Goosse et al. also showed a composite of 4 Antarctic ice core records (3 deuterium, 1 O18). Neither of these comes up to the 20th century making plotting on the same scale as observed temperature rather tricky!

Terry Serepisos departed Wellington for Los Angeles this week in a continuation of his long-running quest to secure offshore financing, Business Day understands.

John Fisk of PricewaterhouseCoopers, who is receiver and liquidator of more than a dozen of the bankrupt property developer’s companies, said he had heard about the LA trip but was unaware of the details.

A spokesman for the Official Assignee, who has to approve a bankrupt’s travel overseas, said Serepisos was given consent to travel abroad between March 2 and 13.

Serepisos recently told an Auckland gossip columnist that he wanted to relocate to Auckland because “Wellington is too much of a fishbowl”. The Official Assignee’s office confirmed the bankrupt would not need permission to make a move within New Zealand.

Wrong way Terry – your funds from Mr Ahsan Ali Syed of Western Gulf Advisory are in Dubai.

Not so that you’d notice due to the distinct lack of coverage in our main stream media but there has been brewing for more than a week another storm about the Climategate emails. I wonder when the media wills tart publishing details here?

One of the main protaganists of global warming sent the following email. Why would Phil Jones be worrying about a “lack of warming”? I thought warming of the planet was killing us all…and here he is worrying about a lack of warming.

Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the “scientists” at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they’d like it to be.

In other words, what these emails confirm is that the great man-made global warming scare is not about science but about political activism. This, it seems, is what motivated the whistleblower ‘FOIA 2011’ (or “thief”, as the usual suspects at RealClimate will no doubt prefer to tar him or her) to go public.

Ever more risibly desperate become the efforts of the believers in global warming to hold the line for their religion, after the battering it was given last winter by all those scandals surrounding the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

One familiar technique they use is to attribute to global warming almost any unusual weather event anywhere in the world. Last week, for instance, it was reported that Russia has recently been experiencing its hottest temperatures and longest drought for 130 years. The head of the Russian branch of WWF, the environmental pressure group, was inevitably quick to cite this as evidence of climate change, claiming that in future “such climate abnormalities will only become more frequent”. He didn’t explain what might have caused the similar hot weather 130 years ago.

If they can argue that unusual weather events that “prove” their as yet un-proven theory that the Earth is warming and humans are causing it, then the opposite must also be true, in fact the opposite is actually more likely to be true.

Meanwhile, notably little attention has been paid to the disastrous chill which has been sweeping South America thanks to an inrush of air from the Antarctic, killing hundreds in the continent’s coldest winter for years.

In America, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been trumpeting that, according to its much-quoted worldwide temperature data, the first six months of this year were the hottest ever recorded. But expert analysis on Watts Up With That, the US science blog, shows that NOAA’s claimed warming appears to be strangely concentrated in those parts of the world where it has fewest weather stations. In Greenland, for instance, two of the hottest spots, showing a startling five-degree rise in temperatures, have no weather stations at all.

In other words, the warmists simply lie and continue to lie to prove the un-proven. Fortunately there are actually thousands of enthusiastic amateurs and some seasoned professional out there that can, with modern technology, show the world their lies.

A second technique the warmists have used lately to keep their spirits up has been to repeat incessantly that the official inquiries into the “Climategate” scandal have cleared the top IPCC scientists involved of any wrongdoing, and that their science has been “vindicated”. But, as has been pointed out by critics like Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit, this is hardly surprising, since the inquiries were careful not to interview any experts, such as himself, who could have explained just why the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were so horribly damaging.

The perfunctory report of the Science Appraisal Panel, chaired by Lord Oxburgh, examined only 11 papers produced by the CRU, none of them remotely connected to what the fuss was all about. Last week Andrew Montford, author of The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science, revealed on his blog (Bishop Hill – bishophill.squarespace.com) that the choice of these papers was approved for the inquiry by Sir Brian Hoskins, of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College, and by Phil Jones, the CRU’s former director – an appraisal of whose work was meant to be the purpose of the inquiry.

This technique, you will notice has been used by the sock-puppets at The Standard and also by other “luminaries” of the left like Bomber. The sad truth too is that precious few in the MSM repeater and churnalist ranks routinely question the warmists. When they were caught pants down and in the back of a goat with the CRU emails, the MSM largely looked the other way, until bloggers released so much information that it could no longer be ignored. Similarly with the egregious errors discovered in the IPCC AR4. It is outrageous that an organisation, reputedly staffed by the world’s leading experts, made palpably false claims and the media and politicians simply shrugged and allowed them to say that mistakes happen and then continued to fund them to the tune of billions.

A third technique, most familiar of all, has been to fall back on the dog-eared claim that leading sceptics only question warmist orthodoxy because they have been funded by “Big Oil” and the “fossil fuel industry”. Particularly bizarre was a story last week covering the front page and an inside page of one newspaper, headed “Oil giant gives £1 million to fund climate sceptics”.

The essence of this tale was that Exxon Mobil, the oil giant that is the world’s third biggest company, last year gave “almost £1 million” to four US think-tanks. These had gone on to dismiss the Climategate inquiries as “whitewashes”.

It was hardly necessary to be given money by Exxon to see what was dubious about those inquiries. Not one of the knowledgeable sceptics who have torn them apart has received a cent from Big Oil. But what made this particularly laughable was that the penny-packets given to think-tanks that have been largely irrelevant to the debate are utterly dwarfed by the colossal sums poured into the army of groups and organisations on the other side of the argument.

Even the big oil companies have long been putting their real money into projects dedicated to showing how they are in favour of a “low-carbon economy”. In 2002 Exxon gave $100 million to Stanford University to fund research into energy sources needed to fight global warming. BP, which rebranded itself in 2004 as “Beyond Petroleum”, gave $500 million to fund similar research.

The Grantham Institute provides another example. It was set up at the LSE and Imperial College with £24 million from Jeremy Grantham, an investment fund billionaire, to advise governments and firms on how to promote and invest in ways to “fight climate change”, now one of the fastest-growing and most lucrative businesses in the world.

Compare the funding received by a handful of think-tanks to the hundreds of billions of dollars lavished on those who speak for the other side by governments, foundations, multinational corporations, even Big Oil, and the warmists are winning hands down. But only financially: they are not winning the argument.

No, they are not winning the argument, except perhaps here in New Zealand where we have a Prime Minister and a government advised by an idiot, scared of upsetting the hand-wringers and panty-waists of middle New Zealand, scared to an inch of their over-taxed lives by the lies of the warmists.

I can hardly wait for the day when they will be forced to apologise. I want Al Gore to be first on the list, that is if he can tear himself away from massage therapy.